The &os; Project $FreeBSD$ 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 The &os; Documentation Project &tm-attrib.freebsd; &tm-attrib.ibm; &tm-attrib.ieee; &tm-attrib.intel; &tm-attrib.sparc; &tm-attrib.general; The release notes for &os; &release.current; contain a summary of the changes made to the &os; base system on the &release.branch; development line. This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since the last release, as well as significant changes to the &os; kernel and userland. Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented. This document contains the release notes for &os; &release.current;. The latest version can be found at . This distribution of &os; &release.current; is a &release.type; distribution. It can be found at or any of its mirrors. More information on obtaining this (or other) &release.type; distributions of &os; can be found in the Obtaining &os; appendix to the &os; Handbook. All users are encouraged to consult the release errata before installing &os;. The errata document is updated with late-breaking information discovered late in the release cycle or after the release. Typically, it contains information on known bugs, security advisories, and corrections to documentation. An up-to-date copy of the errata for &os; &release.current; can be found on the &os; Web site. The most user-visible new or changed features in &os; since 8.0-RELEASE can be found at Beginning with &os; 6.2-RELEASE, binary upgrades between RELEASE versions (and snapshots of the various security branches) are supported using the &man.freebsd-update.8; utility. The binary upgrade procedure will update unmodified userland utilities, as well as unmodified GENERIC or SMP kernels distributed as a part of an official &os; release. The &man.freebsd-update.8; utility requires that the host being upgraded have Internet connectivity. An older form of binary upgrade is supported through the Upgrade option from the main &man.sysinstall.8; menu on CDROM distribution media. This type of binary upgrade may be useful on non-&arch.i386;, non-&arch.amd64; machines or on systems with no Internet connectivity. Source-based upgrades (those based on recompiling the &os; base system from source code) from previous versions are supported, according to the instructions in /usr/src/UPDATING. Upgrading &os; should, of course, only be attempted after backing up all data and configuration files.